I'm taking piano lessons with my son

At a recent dinner party, the host asked an unexpectedly poignant question: “What is sparking joy for you?” There were about a dozen of us at the table. The answers were a mixed bag, but I’d heard many of them before: taking walks at lunch, listening to audiobooks instead of the news, rekindling an old friendship, etc.

My own answer surprised me: “Taking piano lessons with my 5-year-old.”

Why, of all things, does this activity bring me disproportionate satisfaction?

The challenges we face right now are so large that I find myself “dreaming small.” Counterintuitive maybe, but I’ve been hearing echoes of this from many others in my networks — there’s a yearning to tackle something within our orbit of control. Something we can wrap our arms around. Daily small doses of connection. Achievable little feats to counter the havoc that surrounds us.

The piano lessons started because my wife loves a good deal. At the height of the pandemic, she saw a posting for a free piano on Buy Nothing Roslindale. Two piano movers and one tune-up later (my killjoy response: "Not actually free!"), and we plunked that sucker in our dining room.

As a kid, I took lessons for 10 long years. “Do it for your own enjoyment,” my grandmother Mimi told me. But I didn’t enjoy it. I did it for her. As the most accommodating grandchild, I obliged her by taking lessons but never practiced in between. And as a middle child who tended to avoid conflict, I was able to hide this from Mimi and my mother — but not my teacher. Thus, lessons became a weekly exercise in shame and guilt, the metronome ticking away.

Looking at that Buy Nothing piano wedged into the corner of our dining room, those feelings came back, but now nearly 40, I knew shame and guilt even better than I did as a child. They are old friends — old friends that often appear when I try new things. But I saw that piano as an opportunity to flip the script, for me and my son.

Ezra is 5 going on 40. Bright, blue eyes, chipmunk cheeks, he stands about a head shorter than most kids in his class, but his confidence, humor, determination and smarts command respect from classmates far beyond his stature. I’m proud that he’s already read “Charlotte’s Web,” but I worry about his impatience with himself and his constant awareness of whether he’s measuring up. “I’m making progress” is a phrase he uses regularly. A highly routinized planner, he sets the kitchen timer to count down to daily events like leaving for school and bathtime. The beeping drives us crazy. Starting to get the picture?

I wondered how it might be for a kid like him and a dad like me to learn something new together. After I re-learned the melodies for “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” both of my kids started gathering around when I tinkered with the keys. Ezra even nabbed one of the books with blank sheet music at the end and composed his own little song: “Sun, Sun, Sun” and played it for me. Clearly, he was interested.

But I was nervous because trying new things had not often gone well for Ezra. Sparks flew after we played musical chairs at his birthday party. The other kids were faster and he didn’t win. Candlepin bowling, with its constant score tallies, had been a recipe for rage and meltdown. It’s all I can do to manage my own frustration through these moments.

But something about the present state of our world made it feel important to put my little dream into high gear. The piano in my dining room presented a challenge I could (maybe) overcome, so I put my misgivings aside and hired a piano teacher named Sydney. She comes to our house after I pick Ezra up from school on Mondays.

She spends 30 minutes with him and 30 minutes with me. During my lesson, Ezra hangs around, listening to every word, while doing his usual 5-year-old stuff. JT, his Squishmallow stuffy, magically appears at my side on the piano bench. Once, he proudly informed us that he had gone poop during my lesson and wondered if we noticed!

When he sits down with Sydney, I go upstairs to “work.” But I am actually listening to them. I hear giggling and singing. Before I know it — Bam! The kid can play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” while singing it. Is this what my lessons were like? Was there silliness? Or just the clicking away of the metronome, while my mother reported my “progress” to my grandmother?

The other day, we were driving home from school to his lesson and he said:

“Dad, I noticed something.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s hard to sing and play at the same time! Did you ever notice that?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I find that hard, too. Do you feel embarrassed sometimes when you mess up?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, too.”

“It’s fun getting better, though.”

“It really is.”

Being a dad right now is rough. Imagining my son in a world that feels as if it’s coming apart at the seams is hard to stomach. How do I raise a child in this environment? How can I balance resilience with compassion and care? It’s hard to know where to focus. I get overwhelmed. And when I feel lost or helpless, sitting down at the piano allows me to express all that anxiety. I feel like I’m working hard to make something beautiful.

I’m shocked to report that I practice every day now, and I am actually, as Ezra would say, “making progress” with help from Sydney — and Ezra. We’re both unraveling some tangled threads by learning a new thing — and it’s messy. Unlike in my childhood, when the expectation was perfection, this time my goal is to model vulnerability and self-compassion, for Ezra and for me.

In February, I popped some cross-country skis on Ezra for the first time, anticipating a rerun of the tears and fury of the musical-chairs incident. Instead, he slipped and fell his way forward with surprising persistence, unfazed when he lost his balance or hit a bump. After he face-planted into the snow coming down a hill, he popped up and shouted with a big grin on his face: “Dad, falling is part of learning!” The tears flowed, but this time they were mine.

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